Consumers spend a considerable portion of their income on vacation travel. A certain proportion of consumers prefer to take this travel in destinations with which they are not already familiar. Accordingly consumers have to spend considerable time on planning, with the risk that the travel will be ruined by a poor choice of destination, or of product providers in those destinations. The term “product” in this document is used to include both goods and services, and the term “product provider” (or equivalently “merchant”) is thus used to include an individual or organization which operates one or more hotels, restaurants, shops, vehicle hire companies, etc. The term “hotel” is used in this document to describe any place which offers lodging (in particular, temporary lodging) to visitors on a paid basis, and thus includes not only conventional hotels but also guest houses, serviced apartments, and even rented rooms. The term “destination” is used to mean a geographical region, such as a town, or a county, or a predefined section of a town or county. Typically a destination is large enough to include a plurality of hotels.
Although there is endless information about travel destinations available on internet, much of it is unreliable. For example, the websites of hotels typically provide carefully selected images which are not typical of the experience of a traveler staying in the hotel. Social media websites such as Tripadvisor.com contain reviews written by people who allege that they have stayed at the hotel, but in some cases these reviews are actually written by individuals who are not genuine travelers, such as individuals associated with the hotel (or with the hotel's competitors), and the reviews contain biased information. Even if the reviews are by genuine travelers, those travelers may be untypical (e.g. only those travelers who have had a bad experience, or only travelers from a certain demographic). Furthermore, a small hotel may not be reviewed at all, or very rarely, so any reviews available for it may be old and give out of date information. For these reasons, it is hard to rely on the information available online.
Furthermore, the needs of travelers differ according to the type of travel they are taking. Some travelers, especially ones accompanied by young children, prefer to spend the entire vacation at a single location. Other travelers prefer take a vacation which is a journey including multiple travel destinations (a “road trip”). The term “travel destination” is used to mean a geographical location of the kind which is conventionally marked in a travel atlas, such as a city, or a region of a country. The travel destinations are not locations with which the traveler has a long-term association, in other words locations where the traveler habitually spends time (e.g. where the traveler resides or which he or she habitually visits). Often the travel destinations of a road trip are spaced apart pairwise by a relatively short distance (such as no more than 300 km, no more than 200 km or even no more than 100 km). Typically, the travelers stay for a short time (perhaps just one night, or a small number of nights) in each travel destination, and travel (typically by ground-based transport such as a car, train or bus) between them. Such travelers may prefer to use hotels which are well-located for transport networks, so the travelers rate that hotel characteristic more highly than, for example, whether the hotel provides child-care for young children.
There is a need to assist consumers with selection of travel destinations and with product providers in those travel destinations.